"Everyone thinks of Los Angeles as the ultimate car city, but the city's relationship with petroleum products is far more significant than just consumption," declared the Center for Land Use Interpretation in 2010.

"Los Angeles is the most urban oilfield, where the industry operates in cracks, corners, and edges, hidden behind fences, and camouflaged into architecture, pulling oil out from under our feet," explained the Culver City center's "Lay of the Land" newsletter.

Following the state's first oil wells in Pico Canyon in 1876, the Los Angeles petroleum history began in 1892 when struggling prospector Edward Doheny and his mining partner Charles Canfield decided to drill a well just north of the city.

Doheny picked a site where "tar seeps" of natural asphalt bubbled to the surface. Local lore says he was visiting downtown when he noticed a cart with the black, sticky substance on its wheels. He asked the driver where the cart had come from.

Doheny drilled at a site near present-day Dodger Stadium, between Beverly Boulevard and Colton Avenue. On April 20, 1892, the exploratory well struck oil and revealed the Los Angeles City oilfield.

The well produced about 45 barrels of oil a day from the prolific field, which still produces seeps at the tourist attraction La Brea Tar Pits.

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Actually composed of asphalt and not tar, the animal-trapping pools were discovered in 1769 by a Spanish explorer. Petroleum seeps would prove common throughout California — onshore and offshore.

Doheny's 1892 oil well set off California's first major drilling and production boom. Within two years, 80 Los Angeles wells were producing oil and by 1897, more than 500 wells pumped the thick, "black gold."

Although oversupply caused the price of oil to drop as low as 25 cents a barrel, Doheny and partner Canfield became millionaires. They sold their oil to the city's growing number of industries.

By 1895, Los Angeles City field produced about 750,000 barrels, more than half of the 1.2 million barrels produced in the entire state of California. In 1925, California supplied half of the world's oil.

California Oil Queen

Like many others, Emma Summers got caught up in the excitement of California's burgeoning petroleum industry. She soon became a woman to be reckoned with in the rough and tough Los Angeles oil patch.

A refined southern lady who graduated from Boston's New England Conservatory of Music, Summers moved to Los Angeles in 1893 to teach piano. Her home was not far from the historic discovery well completed just the year before.

Summers invested $700 for a half interest in a new well just a few blocks from Doheny's producing well. Her first drilling attempt did not go well. The well casing collapsed and expensive cable-tools were lost, but Summers persevered. She borrowed another $1,800 to continue the well.

"Night after night, by the light of a flaring torch, she hovered over it, as if it were a sick babe's cradle," reported one witness. Weeks dragged on as her money dwindled, but the well finally came in as a small producer.

Encouraged, Summers drilled more wells. "When I found myself $10,000 in debt, I thought if I ever got that paid and as much more in the bank, I would be glad to quit," she later recalled.

But she didn't quit. Summers became a constant presence in the forest of drilling rigs that had turned the heart of Los Angeles into a "vibrant, oil-soaked little canyon." The former piano teacher was soon known as the California Oil Queen.

"If Mrs. Emma A. Summers were less than a genius she could not, as she does today, control the Los Angeles oil markets," concluded a 1901 newspaper article. Summers died in a Glendale nursing home in 1941 at age 83.

Today, the Los Angeles area has produced more than 9 billion barrels of oil. There are still more than 30,000 active wells pumping about 230 million barrels of oil a year.

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— "Making Hole" is a term for drilling coined long before oil or natural gas were anything more than flammable curiosities. Bruce Wells is the founder of American Oil and Gas Historical Society, a 501C3 nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the history of oil and gas. He is a former energy reporter and editor who lives in Washington, D.C.